1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a communication interface device and a communication method for a computer arranged in a parallel computer architecture that, when receiving data from a sender computer.
2. Description of the Related Art
Data transmission and reception has been performed among a plurality of devices that are connected to each other. The device can be connected to other device in a tree structure or a mesh structure. In a tree structure, there is a demand to multicast communication data to a most-adjacent device, which is a device connected most adjacently to a device under consideration, and to transmit the data to the devices that are located beyond the most-adjacent device.
To meet this demand, conventional arts, such as Japanese Patent No. 2585338 and Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. H9-83701, disclose multi-step relay multicasting methods for facsimile machines. In the disclosed technology, a facsimile machine that receives data from an upper-node facsimile machine transmits the data to a lower-node facsimile machine, which multicasts the data, from information about the lower-node facsimile machine.
In addition, Japanese Patent No. 3495678 discloses a data communication system that includes a sender computer and multiple receiver computers. In this system, the sender computer multicasts data to the receiver computers on the basis of the information that is stored in advance regarding the receiver computers as multicasting destinations. The data communication system also determines the transmission timing from the error information detected on the reception side to improve the reliability of the data multicasting communications.
In these years, a parallel computer architecture is becoming mainstream in place of a conventional large computer. In the parallel computer architecture, multiple computers are connected to one another in a communicable manner and they work cooperatively so that the architecture exhibits a capability of processing and computing enormous volumes of data.
There is a demand, also in the parallel computer architecture, to multicast communication data to most-adjacent computers and to transmit the data to computers that are located beyond the most-adjacent computers. In such processing, internode communications are employed to multicast data to the most adjacently connected computers and also to transmit it to the node computers that are located beyond the adjacently connected computers.
In the conventional technologies disclosed in Japanese Patent No. 2585338 and Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. H9-83701 an interrupt is issued when data is received from an upper node, and another interrupt is issued when the data is forwarded to the following node computer. In other words, even the conventional technologies it is difficult to prevent interrupts from being successively issued.
The conventional technology described in Japanese Patent No. 3495678 aims at increasing the reliability in data multicasting communications. Thus, it is not meant to prevent interrupts from being successively issued.